The Strangford Apollo

The Strangford "Apollo" is of
uncertain provenience, but is nearly related in style to
the marbles of Aegina. This statue, by the position of
body, legs, and head, belongs to the series of "Apollo"
figures discussed above; but the arms were no longer
attached to the sides, and were probably bent at the
elbows. The most obvious traces of a lingering archaism,
besides the rigidity of the attitude, are the narrowness
of the hips and the formal arrangement of the hair, with
its double row of snail-shell curls. The statue has been
spoken of by a high authority[1]
as showing only "a meager and painful rendering of
nature." That is one way of looking at it. But there is
another way, which has been finely expressed by Pater,
in an essay on "The Marbles of Aegina":

"As art which has passed its prime has sometimes the
charm of an absolute refinement in taste and
workmanship, so immature art also, as we now see, has
its own attractiveness in the naivete, the freshness of
spirit, which finds power and interest in simple motives
of feeling, and in the freshness of hand, which has a
sense of enjoyment in mechanical processes still
performed unmechanically, in the spending of care and
intelligence on every touch. ... The workman is at work
in dry earnestness, with a sort of hard strength of
detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that
of an early Flemish painter; he communicates to us his
still youthful sense of pleasure in the experience of
the first rudimentary difficulties of his art overcome."[2]